Vaccines produced in Africa are being exported to Europe

WASHINGTON • Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine was supposed to be one of Africa's most important weapons against the virus.

The New Jersey-based company agreed to sell enough of its inexpensive single-shot vaccine to eventually inoculate a third of the continent's residents. And the vaccine would be produced in part by a South African manufacturer, raising hopes that those doses would quickly go to Africans.

That has not happened. South Africa is still waiting to receive the overwhelming majority of the 31 million vaccine doses it ordered from Johnson & Johnson. It has administered only about 2 million Johnson & Johnson shots. That is a key reason that fewer than 7 per cent of South Africans are fully vaccinated - and that the country was devastated by the Delta variant.

Instead, Johnson & Johnson has been exporting millions of doses that were bottled and packaged in South Africa for distribution in Europe, according to executives at the company and the South African manufacturer, Aspen Pharmacare, as well as South African government export records reviewed by The New York Times.

South African scientist Glenda Gray, who helped lead Johnson & Johnson's clinical trial there, said companies needed to prioritise sending doses to poorer countries that were involved in their production. "It's like a country is making food for the world and sees its food being shipped off to high-resource settings while its citizens starve," she said.

Many Western countries have kept domestically made doses for themselves. That was not possible in South Africa because of an unusual stipulation in the contract the government signed this year with Johnson & Johnson. The confidential contract, reviewed by the Times, required South Africa to waive its right to impose export restrictions on vaccine doses.

Mr Popo Maja, a spokesman for the South African health ministry, said the government was not happy with the requirements in the contract but lacked the leverage to refuse them. "The government was not given any choice," he said in a statement. "Sign contract or no vaccine."

Johnson & Johnson had always planned for some vaccines produced by Aspen to leave Africa, but it has never disclosed how many doses it was exporting. The export records seen by the Times show that Johnson & Johnson had shipped 32 million doses in recent months, although that does not capture the full number that have left South Africa.

Germany in April received shots produced by Aspen, said a German health ministry spokesman. In June and July, Spain received more than 800,000 doses, according to the country's health ministry.

The picture is bleak across the continent. While several African countries received small initial shipments of Johnson & Johnson doses last week, they are a sliver of the 400 million doses the African Union has ordered or has the option to order for its member countries. About 2 per cent of Africans are fully vaccinated.

Johnson & Johnson's chief scientific officer, Dr Paul Stoffels, said the Aspen plant is part of a production network in which vaccines are routinely shipped between countries for manufacturing, quality inspection and delivery.

"We have done our best to prioritise South Africa as much as we can," he said. He noted that Johnson & Johnson early this year provided about 500,000 doses to vaccinate South African healthcare workers. He said the Aspen plant would exclusively supply doses to African countries later this year.

Aspen is responsible for the final stage of vaccine production; it receives mass quantities of the vaccine, bottles it into vials and then packages it for final inspections and delivery.

Some of Aspen's doses were never used because of worries they might have been contaminated at the Baltimore plant that handled their first stage of production, said Johnson & Johnson and Aspen executives. The problems at that plant, run by Emergent BioSolutions, wreaked havoc on Johnson & Johnson's vaccine supplies, leading the firm to fall behind on orders all over the world.

Aspen's CEO Stephen Saad blamed the lack of South African doses on the Emergent plant. He said Aspen cannot control where its doses are sent.

NYTIMES